A Road Map For India

India has a critical decade ahead. Managed well, it will catapult India into a developed country with superpower status. Managed poorly, the opportunity will be squandered.

I would like to believe that this time, India will manage its destiny well. And in my new book, Vision India 2020, I have outlined what I wish to see.

So far India has positioned itself as a software superpower on the shoulders of outsourcing. But is that all that we will ever achieve? With the right guidance, I resolutely believe that the Indian youth have the potential to build their nation's next phase of development--systematic development rather than the haphazard, helter-skelter development we have thus far seen.

Development for India, of course, will not be limited to the technology sector. Driving from Calcutta to Kharagpur last year, I experienced intimately the toll of one of India's many unforgiving bottlenecked roadways: a highway reduced to one lane because of a bridge that has stood derelict for three years. Outside Jaipur, where a thick mass of trucks constrict the flow of traffic, the scene is unchanged. And when I do finally persevere, make it home and find my bed, the noise pollution keeps sleep distant. I toss and turn in bed, listening through the walls to my family members' coughing due to the environmental disaster we have created.

These same trucks that clog my journey to Jaipur are caught up in similar jams up and down the length and breadth of India. They wheeze to a halt trying to deliver goods to train stations to be transported across the heartland of India, or to ports so ships can sail.

And the people? Dripping in sweat, hanging from fuming buses, packed like sardines in trains, they trudge on. Living in postage-stamp-sized slum rooms amid squalor, crime and health hazards, the majority of 21st-century India's citizens live a life far below "superpower" standards.

In the name of development, India has managed to destroy much of its architectural heritage. Real estate entrepreneurs have mercilessly destroyed British-era jewels along with much of the traditional Indian buildings. Such, I understand, is the destiny of developing nations. The same destruction runs from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. It runs in Mexico, in China, in Brazil and in Romania.

Darjeeling, the erstwhile Queen of the Himalayas, once enchanted visitors with pine-lined walks strung from house to house; today flashing neon signs welcome tourists. In the heart of the Himalayas, the picturesque villages are upgraded from utmost poverty and poetry to mediocrity. Their sun-bleached Buddhist prayer flags that flap in the mountain wind no longer whisper their blessings. This is the era of cement, of development for development's sake.

But what of beauty? Of preservation? Paris preserved itself, as did Kyoto and San Francisco. Will India fail to showcase the magic and the mystique of its past? Between consulting and writing over the last decade, I have interacted with thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators, encountering hundreds of business case studies, and from that rich crop I have harvested ideas to answer these issues.

George Will once said, "Not only do ideas have consequences, but only ideas have large and lasting consequences."

Vision India 2020 is my notebook of ideas on entrepreneurship in India. Set in 2020, this futuristic retrospective looks back on the building of a set of particular entrepreneurial ventures, gleaned from the many opportunities I see at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Much in these ventures needs yet be fleshed out.

Whether in film or health care, education or rural development, I have dreamed freely, taking bold, ambitious measures to address impending crises such as water, energy and the environment. As you read this book, take with you that boldness. And afterward, as your own ideas gestate, use my process of envisioning--of imagining a manifestation, in as real of terms as possible, of the company that you will build, the change you will bring about.

It is a powerful experience to project far into the future--your future, based on your ideas, your dreams. But as you dream, be sure to work out the details requisite to your venture's success. I have envisioned details as granular as logos and colors, not to mention margins and pricing. It is within such details that billions of dollars of GDP await. In my model of development, it is the entrepreneurs who wield the most potent weapons of mass reconstruction. Reconstruction to build markets, to build nations, to build worlds.